The present invention relates to displaying coordinated related-search feedback in a single display, to help a user develop, refine and select a useful search. In particular, it relates to conducting a plurality of related searches and making the results simultaneously available to the user in a coordinated display.
Search engines index various collections. Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista and others index the web. Google desktop, dtSearch, operating system utilities and others index workstations and network drives. Larger and larger document collections are available to search. This taxes both the relevancy ranking performed by the search engines and the search formulation skill of the users.
The larger a collection, the harder it is to search and review search results. In searching technology, the trade-off between search breadth and review time is characterized in terms of recall and precision. A broad search recalls more desired results than a narrow search, but with reduced precision, as the broad search produces many irrelevant results. Thesauruses have been offered to make sure that users don't miss relevant search terms, to increase recall, but larger result sets have reduced precision, requiring more review time. Proximity searches (e.g., Dialog and Lexis) and set operations (e.g., Dialog) enable users to refine searches based on prior results, adjusting both recall and precision. On the search result display side, relevance rankings strategies have been developed to bring results that seem most precisely responsive to the searches to the top of the display list.
An opportunity arises to further improve on technologies that assist users in understanding the results of their searches and refining their inquires. Better, more easily reviewed searches with improved recognition of relevant search results and reduced review time may result.